


World Without End

by roseandheather



Series: Bittersweet And Strange [35]
Category: Inspector Lynley Mysteries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-18
Updated: 2012-08-18
Packaged: 2017-11-12 09:20:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/489282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseandheather/pseuds/roseandheather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It ends with a bang, and then with a whimper." Because real love stories never have endings, but everything else does. They had to walk away someday. This is how.</p>
            </blockquote>





	World Without End

It ends with a bang, and then with a whimper.

He sees the glint of light on the barrel just in time, and everything in him screams _NO!_ This time, this now, he will not see her go down again. Twice she has taken a bullet before his eyes and twice he has died and lived with her there on the pavement; he will not do so again.

He is past seventy, she is just half a decade younger, and it has been many years since they could scramble over fences and hurtle down alleyways without feeling all the years of punishment they have put their bodies through, but somehow he finds the reflexes to fling them both to the ground as the gun goes off behind them and the bullet thuds harmlessly into a nearby tree.

In that moment, he is exhausted. Empty. He had thought they could do this forever, the two of them chasing criminals through London and never feeling the years, but now he is not so sure. How many more times can they do this? How many more lives do they have left? How many more times, he wonders, can his heart stop and start again as he comes within yet another hair’s breadth of losing her?

He feels the ache of it to his bones, near misses, old injuries – the scar in his side, a relic of a maniac with a knife in Whitechapel, pulls and aches as he lifts himself from the pavement and cradles his partner of over three decades in his arms.

She is a fragile thing in his embrace, her body shaking itself apart with a fear that hasn’t faded even after all these years, and he curls himself around her to hide her from the world as she pants against his chest, her breaths sparking his, because she is here, she is alive for at least one more day, and that is as essential as breathing, as sunlight, as her voice in his ear and the bright fiery brilliance in her eyes.

She will be black and blue in the morning, his fingerprints written on her skin in blood and sweat and terror, bruised from his grip and from hitting the ground with a force he couldn’t spare her from. But those bruises could have so easily been a bullet hole instead, and he knows the nightmares tonight will be vicious and brutal for both of them.

It’s been a long time since she’s woken up screaming in the night, seeing a madman with a gun instead of the man she’s loved with every breath for longer than she even knows, but this…

This will bring them back with a vengeance, and she murmurs in protest as he clutches her too tightly. He strokes his apology over her hair and back and shoulder, and when he tries to let her go she shakes her head in fierce denial and burrows closer.

Heedless of the passers-by, they sit there, trembling, as the seconds tick past.

They cannot take this any more.

He knows it, and at the same time cannot believe he knows it. Their career had given both of them purpose before they found each other, and more importantly, it had brought them together. Had _kept_ them there, when otherwise they both might have walked away. But it had also worn them down a little more with every broken body, every confession, every display of human cruelty and indifference.

They cannot take this any more. No, _she_ cannot take it any more, and he knows it like he knows she likes salt and pepper crisps but not salt and vinegar, like he knows the soft sound she makes when she comes.

He would have worked through the emptiness once, but now she is infinitely more important, and the choice to walk away and help her heal, or to continue with the career they love but will in the end destroy them both, is not a choice at all.

He could have worked through the emptiness until it destroyed him. But he cannot watch it destroy her.

“It’s all right,” he whispers in her ear at last, his decision made. “Twenty-eight days, Barbara, hold on for twenty-eight days and I swear I will take you home.”

Her fingers convulsively clutch his shirt. “Thank you,” she whispers, too broken to cry. “Thank you for not making me choose.”

“Hush.” He kisses her hair, her cheek, her damp eyelids, a hundred thousand times lighter. Already he can see the sunrise over the moors, and the glow of her hair as dawn turns to day. “Hush, love. It’s almost over. I’ll carry you home.”

“You love me.” She says it as though everything else but that is irrelevant, ephemera, and it makes his breath catch hard in his throat. “You love me so damn much.”

“Yes.” He can’t stop the tears from falling, just a few glittering drops scattering light on her fiery hair.  “Yes. God yes. Desperately. Forever. Like you love me. Just like that, Barbara Lynne.”

Distantly, over the sound of her harsh, jagged panting, he can hear the sirens wail.

**Author's Note:**

> To be continued.


End file.
